“We did,” said the operator.
“How could you? The scale is eight degrees out.”
“It must have slipped.”
Evans took hold of the scale and found it securely fixed in position. He looked carefully for any possible obstruction which might have caught on it as the coil was rotated and forced it round on the shaft, but he found none.
“I don’t see how it could have slipped; it’s on tight enough,” he said.
The operator shrugged his shoulders.
“Are you sure no one made any adjustments here that day?” Evans asked.
“I know I didn’t, and I’m pretty sure my mate didn’t, but I’ll ask him. We were the only ones in here except Gunner Long who came from the Bureau to see that the gear was working. He was here in the shack and sent me to get some wire or something from the main radio room an hour or so before we struck. I was gone only two or three minutes, and that was the only time I was out of the shack all the forenoon. I stayed here till the order came to abandon ship and we all got into the boats.”
His mate, the other radio-compass operator, was sent for, and corroborated his story as far as his own watch was concerned. Evans was baffled. But it was a simple matter to set the apparatus right. He reset the circular scale in its proper position; and he nearly broke his screwdriver tightening the set-screw which held it in position, to be sure it did not “slip” again.
When he returned to Washington to report on his findings, his task was not easy. Elkins, with whom he discussed the matter, was entirely sympathetic. A peculiar combination of circumstances had wrecked the ship. The one time in years when the Gloucester station failed to give accurate bearings happened to coincide with an unaccountable slipping of the scale on the Sheridan’s radio compass. Such a combination of mishaps was not likely to occur again in a generation. It would be absurd to abandon anything so obviously useful because of it. Mortimer was still skeptical, and inclined to follow the advice of Rich, but Evans drove home his point with such earnestness and force, as they discussed it by Mortimer’s study fire, backing up his argument with Elkins’s concurrence, that Mortimer finally said he would allow installation of the gear to continue for the present. But he considered it on trial; any more serious failures or disasters, and the radio compass would be discarded as far as any active use of it in warfare was concerned.